Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to systems and methods for transforming phonemes, graphemes, and other language structures into interactive elements.
Description of the Related Art
Phonemes may be any of a small set of units, often about 20 to 60 in number, and different for each language, considered to be the basic distinctive units of speech sound by which morphemes, words, and sentences are represented. Similarly, graphemes may be a minimal unit of a writing system, such as a set of orthographic symbols (letters or combinations of letters) in a given language that serve to distinguish one word from another and, to some degree, correspond or represent phonemes in an alphabetic writing system.
According to the United States National Reading Panel, Phonemic Awareness training involves teaching students to focus on and manipulate phonemes in spoken syllables and words. For example, Phonemic Awareness training may involve asking a student to demonstrate the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes through phoneme isolation, which requires recognizing individual sounds in words (e.g., identify the first sound in “paste”); phoneme identity, which requires recognizing the common sound in different words (e.g., identify the sound that is the same in “bike”, “boy”, and “bell”); phoneme categorization, which requires recognizing the word with the odd sound in a sequence of three or four words (e.g., identify which word does not belong in “bus”, “bun”, and “rug”); phoneme blending, which requires listening to a sequence of separately spoken sounds and combining them to form a recognizable word (e.g., identify the word that is composed of the phonemes /s/ /k/ /u/ /l/); phoneme segmentation, which requires breaking a word into its sounds by counting the sounds (e.g., identify how many phonemes are there in “ship”); or phoneme deletion, which requires recognizing what word remains when a specified phoneme is removed (e.g., identify the word created if the phoneme /s/ is removed from “smile”). The United States National Reading Panel also found that Phonemic Awareness training that teaches such phoneme manipulation with letters helped normally developing readers and at-risk readers acquire Phonemic Awareness better than Phonemic Awareness instruction without letters.
The United States National Reading Panel also noted that there is general agreement in the experimental literature that computer technology can be used to deliver a variety of types of reading instruction successfully, but that there has been relatively little research in this important area.